I don't know how wide spread the practice of asking someone to a
dance with an elaborate arts and crafts project is but in our high
school it was all but mandatory. It was considered poor form indeed
to just walk up and ask your date out and worse still was to call and
ask. It was expected that you would do something like put balloons in
their room with notes and confetti, or trash their car with soap and
streamers with a note. After someone had been vandalized for the
asking a return prank was in order. Maybe to accept a date a girl
would stuff your locker full of packing peanuts with a note riffing
on the material used to make the mess. Something like ,”I would be
“NUTS” to not go to prom with you.” It was good messy fun for
those kids involved and torture to see what the cool kids got while
your locker remained clean, well – cleaner. My girlfriend was
excited to ask me out to a girls choice dance and I was still trying
to find a way to let her down easy. She chose to destroy my car with
cuteness and it was full of confetti, balloons and candy with a note
that asked to to go with her to the dance. I resigned myself to
making a reply and purchased a pumpkin and a bag of tootsie rolls. I
wrote a note accepting her offer on one of the tootsie roll wrappers
and then emptied the rest of the bag into the hollowed out pumpkin. I
was not really aware that the hot wet interior of a hollow pumpkin
would liquefy the candy into a soupy mess that ran out when the
pumpkin tipped over but a little chocolatey pumpkin juice on your
carpet probably only makes you feel more special. She never found the
note in that train wreck of an answer but she assumed that I had said
yes. I had.
Incredibly Generous Offers
I went to the kitchen got a drink and then had to use the bathroom. I
was in way to deep and I needed an escape plan before this girl,
quite reasonably as it happens, assumed that I was as into her as she
was into me. I really didn't want this thing to get out of hand and
her feelings to get hurt but I think it was already to late for that.
I took as long in the bathroom as a pee could reasonably take without
drifting into the amount of time that could be considered stalling,
or even worse - pooping. I came out to the still darkened house where
my date was waiting in the kitchen. I tried to diffuse the situation
a little by talking a little over-loud, joking and asking where
everyone was. They were, horrifyingly out of town for the entire
weekend. She told me this in an obviously inviting way and I panicked
a little inside knowing that there was no convenient time limit that
I might work towards, which had been my original plan. In adult
retrospect I realize that what I should have done was turn on the
lights and in as gentle way as I could muster apologize and tell her
that I was not interested in pursuing this relationship and then drop
that classic old face saving lie about wanting to still be friends.
If you are familiar at all with the convention of qualifying the next
action by offering a repentant ex post facto mea culpa then
you may recognize that last bit there as a feeble attempt at
justification and rationalization of what I did actually do. What I
did do was follow her when she took my hand and led my downstairs to
the family room and sat me on the couch and then she sat on my lap
with her hands around my neck ready for the kissing to begin. I had a
deep twinge of guilt but there she was, ready and willing and such a
nice kisser that I thought just a little kissing would be nice after
all. After a little of that she whispered in my ear that I could do
anything I wanted to her. That is when the guilt got too much to bear
and I made a little distance between us an looked her in the eye and
came really close to doing the right thing. I told her that I liked
her a lot but that we might be moving to quickly and we should take
it slow. She was once again her very sweet and accommodating self and
said whatever I wanted was fine. I felt let off that particular hook
a little and she sat close to me and turned on the television and
gave me the remote and told me to pick something we could watch
together. I was rolling through what for that time was a huge amount
of channels and got into the high number adult ones that we all paid
for and un-scrambled; it was a teen boy holy grail. While I flipped
though she told me that if I wanted to watch any of those channels it
was fine with her. Two incredibly generous offers in a row and I once
again declined. Instead I found a movie that was on and just starting
and we settled in and cuddled while we watched. She had actually
fallen asleep on my shoulder with her hand on my chest by the time
the movie ended and I tried to gently extract myself and leave
quietly but she woke up and said goodbye and kissed me. I walked back
upstairs and noticed the mix tape she had made for me on the table
and I agonized over whether it would hurt her more to take it and
then break up with her or just leave it. I took it, drove home and
tried to decide what to do.
Our Song
Two weeks after I narrowly averted some
exactly-what-I-thought-I-wanted and I was still not working up the
courage to tell my new girlfriend that I didn't think it was going to
work out. I had agonized about it and tried to keep it as un-touchy
as possible as I thought of a way to let her down easy. She, however
was interested in taking it to the next few levels all at once. This
was a mess and I was too much of a coward to call it off. She chased
me down in the hall more excited than boded well for a quick and easy
breakup. She side hugged me and kissed me on the ear and asked if I
wanted to come over to her house that night. I mumbled, equivocated,
but because she was most insistent and awfully persuasive I agreed. I
got showed, dressed and made up my mind that I was going to tell her
that we would be better off as friends. When I pulled up to her house
I got a little worried because there were no cars in the driveway and
no lights on in the house. No one but one very eager girl was home
all alone and waiting for me. Flip. I went up to the door and rang
and she didn't come for a little too long so I started to think I was
maybe getting stood up. No such luck. She opened the door and threw
herself on me wrapped me up in a firm head hug and kissed me in the
French style. Flip-dang. We went inside and she lead me back through
the dark house to her bedroom to show me some stuff. She had some
posters and books and a stereo which was cued up on a mix tape. She
turned off the lights except for the glow of the stereo display. She
pressed play and gathered me up for a private slow dance. As we
swayed in a slow-hug dance she informed me that the song that was
playing was our song. Oh, no. This was definitely not heading toward
a nice, clean, mutually amicable dissolution of our tacit “going
out” contract. This was my last chance to try and end this like a
rational mature person and true to form I did not do that. I did
finish the song and then as she tried to move the party onto her bed
for what I would assume was the make-out portion of the mix tape I
suddenly needed a drink. Then things got worse.
All Alone and Chicken and Sister Mockery
A few weeks after we started dating there was a weekend where I had
picked up my sister from Job Corps and the rest of my family was out
of town. Once my sister headed out for the night with her friends
that left me alone, in my house, to my own devices while everyone was
away. I called up my new girlfriend and invited her over and she was
more than happy, kind of disturbingly, more than happy actually to
come over. I went and picked her up stopped and rented a movie and
then went back to my deserted house. In my car the bench seat allowed
her to scoot in quite close, which she did. I am not a really cuddly
guy and I really don't like people squeezing in so close as to limit
my range of motion; it makes me claustrophobic, and not in a good
way. She was starting to cross the line into a legitimate safety
hazard as I was straining to drive the six miles back home. We
arrived un-wrecked if not unmolested and went in to pretend to watch
the movie we had rented. The movie in the VCR and started I sat on
the couch for a the nice leisurely warm up to making out I was used
to. Usually with the girls I dated I was the gas and they were the
breaks and if I was over ambitious I could ruin the mood and go home
empty handed. Not so this evening with this girl. She was at
self-immolation levels of gas and I was put in the unusual position
of having to be the breaks because I was not quite sure how far I
wanted this thing to go. As I mentioned before, I liked this girl
just fine; she was cute and into me, which is always a plus. I just
didn't really click with her personality and I definitely didn't like
her friends. Maybe it was already too late to turn back now and tell
her I was hoping for a little light non-committal making out. I was
not enjoying the making out or the movie we were pretending to watch
as I agonized over how I could stop her without shutting this party
down completely. Luckily at that point my sister and her friends, who
were usually all night party people, came back home and gave me an
out. She came in and opened the door and turned on the lights which
is the scientifically best way to end a make out party on the verge
of becoming more party. We quickly straitened up and smoothed
ourselves and my sister made fun of us a little and I had never been
so happy in my life to be caught and teased. My sister and her
friends came in and joked about what we were doing and when they left
to go do some raising of the hells I invited my girlfriend and myself
along to avoid any further possible entrapment and possible
misunderstanding about our relative commitment to this relationship.
I decided that the next day I was going to call her up and let her
know exactly what ground this relationship was on so we didn't have
any false hopes or pretenses. I did really intend to do just that,
and then I chickened out.
Exploitation of an Underclass Woman
After I sort of broke up with my sort of girlfriend from out of town
I started trying to find a local replacement. One of truisms of the
pursuit of women is that there are a couple of ways to go up in looks
and down in effort; you can go younger or foreign. Because we were
essentially landlocked and all the foreign girls I knew we spoken
for, I decided to go younger. There was a girl who had been flirting
with me a little in one of my classes and I decided to call her up
and see if she wanted to go out. She did. I set up a classic movie
and dinner date. When I picked her up she was way overdressed for a
casual evening out and she had a lot too much perfume on but I was
flattered that she was so eager to go out with me. It showed good
taste. She was clingy and cuddly and eager to laugh at all my jokes
which made me feel amazing but by the end of four hours of shameless
adoration I was wondering what she was into and what she liked to do.
She wanted so badly to impress me that she kept trying to like what I
liked, which I didn't like. My problem with women has always been
that certain parts of my brain, outside of my control, really like a
certain ratio of body parts to each other and it responds positively
to that. The more conscious part of my brain, on the other lobe,
really wants to associate with strong, independent, and intelligent
women. Therein lies the rub, I knew some girls who had great ratios
and were very attractive to the part of my brain that was soaked day
and night in testosterone – but many of them were idiots who I
could not stand to be with. Others were smart and funny but possessed
a chassis that for some reason or another my poor, shallow, pig brain
could not reconcile into attractiveness and I would be at an impasse.
This girl was cute and nice but all she wanted was to be who I wanted
her to be and all I wanted was for her to be herself and so we were
trapped in a circular logic mess. The testosterone part of my brain
was very impressed with her desire to cuddle and kiss and told my
sassy over-analytical self-righteous 'she-is-not-very-interesting'
part of my brain to shut up for a bit. That bit of brain and my
traitorous body were quite firm in their insistence on just a little
more of what she had on offer and we would sort out that other
business later.
A Long Way to Go
After our disastrously boring party date and one more rather sisterly
kiss from my would be girlfriend I decided that a two hour drive out
to the boonies was a little far to be driving for less action than I
could get more locally. Hypothetically, of course, but why let the
fact that I didn't have a better option stop me from burning this
particular bridge. I did the decent and manly thing and stopped
returning my friend's calls until after a week or two she got the
hint and stopped calling. She typed me a letter and sent back a
school ID card she had apparently stolen from me so she could have a
picture of me. She wrote some of the usual things, she asked what I
was up to, asked how I was doing, asked if I was still hanging out
with the friends that I was with when we met. Then she got to the
part that made me feel guilty, she said she was sorry she didn't live
up to my expectations and that she was sorry she hurried me out of
the house that morning I had to sleep over. She said she should have
went with me somewhere after the kid's parents got home but she was
so nervous and tired that she didn't know what to do. She said she
was sorry for taking my student ID but that she didn't have any other
picture of me and she would like it if I would send her a picture
back in exchange. She reminded me that I had promised to send her a
picture and write her a poem and she hoped that I would keep that
promise. She wrote that she was sorry for writing such a short and
weird letter but that she had, and I quote, '. . .a dole and borring
life.' She ended the letter, “I miss you.” Then she signed off –
Love Always Your Most Dedicated, and Obligated Fan and then typed her
name. When I read her letter I was overcome with shame for what I
turd I was but I didn't call her back and I didn't write her a
letter. I am no good at telling people bad news and I knew if I
talked to her I would try and cheer her up by asking her out again
and just make it harder for both of us. I never heard from her again.
The Downstairs is Where the Hardcore Kids Are
Downstairs was one of those late 70's brown carpeted, wood paneled,
white stone fireplace jobs that they made by the gazillions. There
were about seven kids, two girls and five boys sitting in the
standardized weed smoking circle and being too cool about it to enjoy
it. They were taking slow and easy tokes passing the joint and then
slowly and smoothly exhaling in the measured ease of kids who were
not just starting into the contraband game. My friend and I were
standing in the the archway letting our eyes adjust to the smokey
gloom when one of the girls asked if we were going to just f-wording
stand there. Those are the kind of questions that you can only sound
like a goober answering. I look at my friend for some direction and
she gave a 'I-don't-know' shrug and looked right back at me looking
for direction of which I had none. The direction I wanted to go was
right back up the stairs, out the door, into the car and find
someplace to make-out with my friend. I didn't want to look like I
was not cool though and I took my girl by the hand and went to sit on
the couch behind the circle. It was one of those couches that had a
nice orange-ish pastoral scenes printed on it. I snuggled my girl
under my arm, sat down and tried to strike up some small talk. I
asked if they were from around there and most of them ignored me
except for the girl who wanted to know about my 'F-wording'
intentions earlier. She giggled derisively and asked the rest of the
room and not me or my date, 'Who the 'Eff' is that guy?' I was not
used to such a cold reception, ever since I got into junior high and
found my stride socially I was unaccustomed to being big-timed by a
bunch of small town hard asses. I would have been intimidated
normally but for some reason this night instead of my normal timidity
when confronted I just got angry. I told her that she didn't need to
be a B-word, I was just trying to hang out. She must had been a
pretty widely regarded as a B-word because right as I called her that
the rest of the room kind of warmed up and laughed. She told me to
preform coitus with myself and asked if we wanted in on the weed
smoking. I told her I didn't really smoke weed and thanked her
anyway. After our little exchange where in we both growled and barked
to see who belonged where everything was copacetic and my girl and I
stayed and talked for a while with the hardcore stoner kids who
turned out to be pretty cool. It was way better then sitting around
and watching that stupid movie with the less adventurous kids.
I Don't Really Smoke Weed
I don't know if it was my fevered imaginations and for the record,
they are quite fevered, but I imagined that there was some cachet
with high school kids to having some inside knowledge about drug and
alcohol consumption. To try and impress those not in the know I often
pretended to have much broader experience with mind altering
substances than I could actually legitimate lay claim to. If some one
mentioned drugs I would knowingly chip in some slangy-winky kind of
implication that I didn't just know what they were talking about I
'KNEW'. I thought that this pretense made me seem more worldly,
dangerous and cool. I don't know if it worked but the fact of the
matter was I had never used drugs and have still never used drugs so
I was a poser in the most clinical and scientific sense of the word.
I had been in the house a couple of time when people went into
another room to smoke some weed and once at a Steve miller Band
concert every one in our group was high but my date and I. That
actually may not be entirely true because there was so many people
smoking so much marijuana that by the end of the show when they
played 'Fly Like an Eagle' I was thinking the rudimentary graphics
projected on screens behind the stage were pretty awesome and the
song's message was pretty deep. In the cold analysis of sobriety they
were not either awesome or deep. That leads to only one conclusion, I
had a second hand smoke high of such an intensity as to make the
watered down saccharine existential musings of a second tier
seventies rock band seem relevant and insightful.
This is neither deep nor insightful. The only way you could think that is if you were high.
Besides that I was
a squeaky clean teetotaler that was intimidated by the idea of the
addiction and spiraling self destruction that would inevitably follow
indulgence. Now that I have confessed to being a good boy we come to
the point of this story. A few weeks after my snowy brush with death
I was back out in Delta to try again with a date. My friend wanted me
to come to a party with her so I drove out and picked her up and we
went to a house even farther out in the boonies where there were lots
of teenagers. There was, however, no adult oversight and there was a
serious lack of fun going on in the house. There was some beer and
bottles of hard liquor on the counter and a few kids were
halfheartedly pawing at a couple of open cans and looking at the
bottles. Whooo-hooo par-tay. Some kids were in the other room
watching a movie. It was that stoner classic and absolute steaming
turd of a movie 'Dazed and Confused'. Oh man that movie sucks, and I
am going to say, 'especially if you are sober' but I would have to
add 'and not a full blown idiot' to that qualification. After I
wandered around the first floor for a bit looking for something even
slightly entertaining I went to the basement to see if that was a
more fruitful field. It was not.
Le Dénouement
My friend was pretty rattled by my early morning return and predicament. She was
even more worried that the owners of the house and the parents of the
children were going to be back the next morning and there was little
chance that they would be understanding about a strange boy sleeping
in their house. She also could not send me back into the storm cold,
wet and tired. She got me some dry clothes and put mine in the dryer,
she put me in a unused downstairs bedroom and told me that I would
have to leave at six in the morning. I was just glad I was not dead
so that seemed like a fair deal and four hours of sleep was more then
I had in my narrowly averted past-future; freezing in a car off the side of the road.
I was still scared about being stuck on the side of the road even
though it was over and I was in a relatively warm bed with a strange
man's clothes on trying to go to sleep. At 5:45 my friend came
downstairs to kick me out before the kids saw me or the adults came
home. I changed back into my now dry clothes and was heading out into
the clear blues and purples of an early winter morning. I decided to
try for one more kiss before I went but she was not really in the
mood for that at the moment and I was kiss dodged and gently pushed
towards my sometimes miraculous car. The tough old rattletrap started up and I drove back
into town got gas and drove home the safer but longer lowland route
to the East. The roads were clear and dry when the sun came up and I
considered my situation sighed, smiled and decided that life was not so bad
sometimes, not so bad at all.
Redemption
Cold and panicked, I got out and looked over the situation. The car
had come off the road and slid sideways down a pretty steep
embankment and the snow was coming down hard. I hiked up the road and
looked up and down in the eerie light of the snowstorm and looked in
vain for five minutes for the redemption of some headlights. I didn't
really think there was going to be a truck passing in the middle of
the night on a deserted road but I was hoping for miraculous
redemption. I went back and got into the car and started it to see
how much gas I had left, about a quarter of a tank. In that car a
quarter tank meant a very long time driving but I was not sure if it
would last the six or seven hours I needed until morning. I decided
that I just needed to try and drive out get back on the road and
drive back to the house my girl was baby sitting in. I got out and
cleared the tires the best I could which meant I was now soaking wet
and freezing. I got back in the car and said a prayer, turned the car
on and then tried to drive up the embankment. I tried to drive strait
up it and slid sideways and killed the engine again. I was so cold
and tired that I felt defeated and put my head down on the steering
wheel and cried. I pulled myself together and reasoned that the angle
was too steep to go strait up so I would have to go sideways a couple
of hundred feet and slowly crest the ridge. The problem there was
that I couldn't see what was in front of me and the snow was still
filtering down cutting visibility to just a few feet in front of me.
I decided it was too late to have another plan so I once again went
with the ram-it-home school of engineering and straitened the wheel
gunned the engine and drove like a crazy person hard forward and
slightly to the left. After an interminable ten seconds I felt the
car crest the ridge and the tires go back to just slipping on snow
and not snow and gravel. I drove the six miles back into town and
luckily remembered the way back to my girlfriend's. II had been gone
an hour and a half so it was really late now and she was not
interested in answering the door while she was all alone at night in
a farm house. I knocked and knocked shivering and yelling that it was
me and for her to answer the door and let me in. she finally got up
the courage to look out and see who it was and then let me in. I told
her what had happened and I called my mom to let her know I would not
be coming home. This would have been the part where I should have
apologized and told her I was sorry for lying and that I almost died
because I was an idiot. Instead I told her that I when I was driving
home from my friends house in the snow storm I had slid off the road
got saved and was now back at his house and going to spend the night.
The main problem with that story was that on her side of the mountain
it was not snowing which made my story just a little bit implausible.
I countered her observation that it was not snowing with a clever
tale of black ice and a small amount of snow. She sounded skeptical
but I told her I was cold and tired and was going to bed and I would
be home in the morning.
A Secret Date and Snow Storm
The rest of the date was boring, we went to a dance where no one
danced and then to a friend's house to not watch a movie while the
more committed couples made out and the rest of us sat around
awkwardly passing time. I got a single kiss and hug for my troubles,
rip-off. She was much warmer on the phone after that and she kind of
thought we were a couple. Two weeks after the date dance she invited
me to come over and hang out with her while she babysat some young
children while their parents were out of town for the weekend. Alone
with a girl in the house for the weekend? Yes, please and thank-you.
I Wanted to go and hang out but my mother might naturally ask all
sorts of silly questions about why a sixteen-year-old was going over
to stay at a house with a seventeen-year-old while the adults were
gone. I was hoping something moderately to very naughty so I threw
her off the trail with that old chestnut of duplicity – the lie. I
told her I was going to a town in the opposite direction to hang out
with boys. The double switch of place and company was intended to
throw her so far off the trail as to keep her safely in the dark. I
took the Tercel wagon and drove the shorter but more desolate and
dangerous route over the mountain to Delta. I got there okay after a
little over an hour and what I hoped would be a snuggly kissy evening
turned into helping babysit until 11 when the little terrors finally
went to sleep. Now, I thought would be the time. She thought we
should just cuddle and talk. Which we did until 1 am when I thought
I should head home to keep the illusion that I was safely and
unsneekily where I had said I would be. I walked outside only to find
that in the time I had not been making out with my sorta girlfriend
it had snowed 3 inches. We were in a rural part of a rural town on a
weekend night so the chances of the roads being cleared was roughly
nope, bordering on laughably nope. I decided to disregard the weather
and drive home any way because in the calculus of youth getting home
and staying ungrounded is more important than risking death. I got
one more fairly chaste kiss and then I was off into the still falling
snow. I drove back to town which was dark and abandoned with only a
splattering of porch and street lights to color the almost white out
snow yellow. I drove out of town and onto the forty mile stretch of
basically uninhabited and probably untraveled till morning road. The
snow had completely obscured the lines and all I could see was the
tops of the sticks that marked the sides of the road that lead to
the top of the pass and through a small town and then on through
three more small towns and then home. I had only one working
headlight and I was leaning as far forward as I could to strain to
see the markers and to keep my increasingly unsteady car on the road.
About six miles outside of town the road turned and I did not and I
drove down an embankment twenty or so feet until I bumped into
something that was covered in snow. The car jolted to a stop, stalled
and died. I had not seen another car since I left my friend's
babysitting house and I was stuck off the side of the road in a
snowstorm woefully under-dressed to spend the night in a car or
walking to find help. I had on some jeans and a long sleeve shirt
because when I had left it was a reasonable warm fall day and no snow
in sight. I was really scared it was getting cold, it was very dark
and the only person who knew where I was thought I was driving home
and would not check to see if I made it there safely. I was in a bad
way.
Fellow Long Hairs Engaged In A Battle of Wits
After We hit it off at a free for all dance my new romantic interest
from Delta invited me to come with her to a date dance at her school.
I agreed because I thought it might be a good opportunity for some
sexy time and the upshot of having a distant girlfriend is that you
can have a local one as well and no one will ever know. What I forgot
about was the territorial pissing of the local hillbillies and their
shriveled and under-developed senses of humor. On date dances it was
usual to go as a group, do an activity, go to dinner, go to the
dance, and then do an after activity. Quite a commitment of time and
money and there is no guarantee you will have fun or like your date's
friends and their even more distantly associated boyfriends. I
thought it would be okay and I was wrong. I drove down in the early
afternoon in my mom's Toyota Tercel wagon which is basically the
ugliest car ever produced in the history of the world. When I rolled
up my date came out and gave me a hug and was generally pretty cuddly
which I took as a good sign. I met her mom and dad and then she rode
with me to meet her friends to go ride some ATV's. We got to her
friend's boyfriend's house and the mood got downright chilly when I
walked in. I might mention that I had long hair at this point in my
life and in deep hillbilly country long hair was supposed to be
incorporated into a nice well permed mullet not some faggy surfer
look. While we waited for the rest of the couples a few of the guys
bolstered in their courage by their numbers started to make louder
and louder asides about how I looked like some kind of skater queer
and that my car was also homosexual. It seemed like they were hoping
to start a fight and I did not like my odds. The trick to avoiding
fights when you are a smart ass is to not look like you want to avoid
the fight, bullies are easily spooked by confidence. Truth be told
not many people really want to fight they just want to stand over
someone and bark so that heir friends can see how tough they are. I
took the offensive and walked up to the three boys making the asides
and introduced myself and acted like I never heard there stage
whispered insults. They had no idea what to do when directly
confronted and started to squirm and fidget as I engaged them in some
small talk. As a subtle jab about the long hair double standard I
asked the ring leader about his ramen noodle looking luxuriantly
shiny mullet if it was naturally curly or a perm.
 |
| Seriously, his hair looked exactly like this but less delicious. |
He was caught off
guard and replied that it was a perm. I pretended to be fascinated
that guys got perms and followed up with a question about weather he
went to the salon for that or if his mom did it. I also asked how
often it needed to be touched up to remain in top form. He was at a
complete loss seeing that he was not on the gay looking hair high
ground and was clearly uncomfortable with the tack this conversation
was taking. His two friends were obviously the small fish and with
their leader being interrogated about beauty regimens they became so
uncomfortable that they just laughed uncomfortably and made weak
jokes about how it was funny that he got perms from his mom. They
lost interest in the conversation and wandered off and left me to my
own devices to chat up the ladies as we waited, in vain as it turned
out, for the rest of the crew to show up for the ride. Then we went
to dinner.
Picking Up Parking Lot Girls
One day when my friends and I should have been in class we were
tooling around the parking lot instead. The bell had rang so we were
going to head back in and go to the next class when we we stopped by
a couple of strangers in a beater of a car. I had been told never to
talk to stranger in a car because they will kidnap you but these
strangers were pretty good looking girls so I decided to relax my
caution just a touch and see if they might kidnap me and, God
willing, perhaps molest me. It was evident pretty early on that these
girls had one thing on their mind, and disappointingly it was getting
directions back to the freeway so that they could go home. Not every
random encounter ends in a fling, this one had to simmer. We gave
them directions but also got their phone numbers so we could chat
them up at a distance. Back in the pre-cell phone days we had to all
talk on the same land line on different phones or do some party line
action. I did not have party line so a friend and I got on the
portable and corded phone and dialed up the mysterious strangers. The
beautiful thing about hormonal motivation is the prospect of calling
a complete stranger with no plan about what to talk about seemed like
a reasonable undertaking. I dialed, Delta the town an hour away where
the girls hailed from and the cute blonde girl answered. She said she
had been hoping we would call and asked which one I was when I
described myself she seemed disappointed and asked if the tall one of
my friends was there. He was, and I was not impressed with here taste
in men. My main problem I think is that I have a high voice and an
abrasive manner that usually has a polarizing effect on people who
know me. I think calling it polarizing might give the impression that
my personality sorts out people roughly equally into like and
dislike camps. I have checked the numbers and I think the evidence
shows that I am more of an acquired taste and some people don't have
the intestinal fortitude to stick out the rather rigorous initiation
phase of being my friend. After I was spurned in favor of my deeper
voiced, taller friend I became even less nice. If you are familiar at
all with girls you know that many of them are inexplicably drawn to
jerks, she happened to be one of them and the change of tactic drew
her in. When we made plans to meet up with her and her friends at a
dance at a town that roughly split the distance she was obviously
swayed in her preference and spent the night dancing with me and
laughing at my jokes. I guess that I had been incorrect in my
original assessment about her defective taste in men. See? I can
admit when I was wrong.
CB James
There
was a process of correcting papers in our physics class that saved
our teacher even the precious little effort required of her. We would
take our tests, homework, or quizzes and pass them to a fellow
student who would write CB -meaning 'Checked By'- and then their name
at the top so there was a chain of custody so that if there was a
mistake the offender could be sought out and beaten. Actually it was
just a ruse on the part of our lazy teacher to scare us into honesty
and it did not work on me. When I had not done homework I would
pretend to pass my undone worksheet to the left and right and then
switch my neighbor's papers and as she read the answers I would fill
them in give myself a 100% and then write CB James at the top and
turn it in with the rest. James had a well earned immaculate
reputation and wholly unimpeachable character so that is why I
employed his name in my ruse. It was the fact that I used James's
name that ultimately foiled my plans for world domination. One day
when our sluggard teacher was feeling particularly lazy she told us
to read quietly while she talked on the phone in her office. She
asked James to come up and take the huge pile of unrecorded homework
and input it into the grading program because she had some urgent
shirking to do before her dereliction appointment later that day. He
must have been surprised to learn that he had corrected each and
every one of my homework worksheets, returned a perfect score on each
and then crudely forged his own name at the top after CB. He was so
interested in this strange phenomenon that he brought it to our
teacher's attention. She called me to the front of the class and
asked how such a strange thing came to happen. It was one of those
cases in which the idea of being caught never crossed my mind so when
I was interrogated I went blank and was at a loss for words, which
for me was a pretty big deal. The traitorous bullshit center of my
brain displayed cowardice most unseemly and deserted in the face of
the enemy leaving me to stammer something about it being a joke. She
was mostly uninterested so she decided to give me a trial by ordeal
to see if I had cheated and wrote three problems from the homework on
the board and then asked me to work them in front of the class. Oh,
the physics gods were kind that day and had muddled her mind into
making a classic blunder, I loved nothing more than displaying my
intelligence for an audience and you would not believe how hard it
was to get a captive audience in the wild to observe physics and
calculus. Chalk in hand I deftly worked every problem to perfection
because I hated worksheets not physics and I had this stuff down
cold. She was irritated that her plan didn't work and gave me credit
for all my cheating which propelled me to the top five in the class. The lesson I learned here, years before Lance Armstrong made it popular was 'Cheat to Win'.
Do You Think This Hurts Woodchuck?
In my physics class I was not learning anything, it was an intro
class for juniors and seniors and we were learning stuff that my
science teacher had covered in seventh grade. I was bored, bored,
bored. The teacher was one of those ladies who assumes because she
has terrible personal hygiene and has no friends that she must be
smarter than anyone else. She was not smart but really officious and
condescending. One time I tried to engage her in a conversation
about t he fallibility of scientific knowledge and she told me we know
for a fact that science is right now even though it had been wrong in
the past. I pointed out that there was no way for a local observer to
infer universal truths and she said we definitely could. I couldn't
understand why she was so ignorant of her own field and may have told
her that. We were not friends. She is not the point of this story
however it was a little girl who play Woodstock in the school's
production of a play about Charlie Brown. She was absolutely and
almost cruelly cast to type in that she was petite, skinny and
birdlike. She seemed like an okay gal but she sat close to me and a
friend of mine who were bored so we would give her grief. I would ask
what it was like to play a woodchuck in the play. She would correct
me in an exasperated tone and tell me it was Woodstock. She would ask
if I had ever even seen a Charlie Brown cartoon or comic. I lied and
said no. I would ask her how much wood she was required to chuck for
the role and she would roll her eyes. I think she liked the
attention. At some point our extreme boredom and young missus
woodchuck came together in a joke that caught on more widely. While
I was sitting back in my chair the zipper on my pants was curling up
into a funny bulge which I started pulling into a more dramatic
shape. Out of the blue I asked, “Hey Woodchuck, do you think this
hurts?” and then punched my fists together on the fabric bulge over
my crotch. She laughed and said I was a retard and then told me to
stop. I reset the bulge and then made a big deal of winding up to
give it a hard smash. She giggled and told me to stop. At that point
my friend started doing it on his pants and then the third boy at the
table of four joined in and soon we were all laughing and getting
scolded. I demonstrated the joke to someone out in the hall at lunch
and told the back story about asking Woodchuck if she thought it
hurt. In the communication it was confused into calling pulling up a
bulge in your pants and punching it between your fist a woodchuck. I
don't know how long it went on for but it was still around when my
wife came through the school four years later because she told me
that punching a bulge in your zipper was called a woodchuck. My
legacy of pseudo crotch punching.
The Ram-It-Home School of Car Mechanics Fails
I don't know ho widespread the term 'digging' is for off-road driving
but that is what we used to describe what we were up to that day we
drove to Forebay. Here is a typical/hypothetical conversation that
will put our hillbilly slang into context:
“Hey, you guys go sloughing (to skip school for fun) to go diggin'
up to Forebay?”, asks a typical/hypothetical hillbilly who had been
left out of the sloughing and digging.
“Yes”, would be the typical/hypothetical response from the
typical/hypothetical me who had indeed gone sloughing and digging.
Hope that cleared it up for you.
After we drove up to Forebay and the muffler which was already leaky
broke most of the way off and was dragging on the road putting off
plenty of sparks. We were drivign down the canyon screaching and
blazing so I decided to drive around in a muddy field on the side of
the road to try and finish off the muffler. We drove and stuck and
unstuck the car for about an hour and that stupid muffler was still
hanging on by a tread but some of the guys had to get home so we
drove the six miles back home grinding off the muffler slowly. When
we got to my friend Jordan's house I climbed under the car with some
tools to try and unbolt the mostly loose muffler but the ripping and
dragging had jammed up the bolts and they refused my gentle coaxing
and prolific cursing. My play devolved from a civilized attempt at
that most noble of primate arts, tool use; back to what made us the
top species on the planet - the ram-it-home school of mechanics.
 |
| Like Hannibal's elephants or Catherine's horse sometimes you just have to go big and then go home. |
I
got a long rope and a ratcheting tie strap and connected the muffler
to the telephone pole that was by the drive way and I got a running
start at driving downhill out of their driveway to snap the exhaust
system off. I don't want to bog you down with a lot of high level
physics and whatnot but when I hit the end of the hundred foot rope
the tatters of the muffler pipe were more then enough to snap my car
to a stop and send me pretty hard into the steering column that
bloodied my nose, honked the horn and pissed me right off. The people
watching were not so angry more entertained if anything. They were
all laughing and telling me to give it another go. I invited them to
preform a sex act on themselves and to shut up. I gave it one more
tentative yank and then unstrapped my rig and drug my muffler home
across town and then cut it off with a saws-all like I know how. When
my dad asked how the muffler cam off I told him it just fell off when
I drove at a reasonable speed over a speed-bump. Must have been
loose.
Forebay
There was a trail just up the mouth of the canyon behind our school
that was the preferred refuge for the hillbilly caste as the avoided
the rigors of academia. The trail has since been closed but at the
time the only barrier to entry was the deeply rutted and nearly
impassable road that all but required a four-wheel drive vehicle. It
was a kind of badge of honor to have ridden there in your truck and
spent time that should have been spent in the classroom free and in
the wild. One day when some friends and I were out on our
recognizance tooling around in the Fairmont we decided to give the
Forebay trail a try and see if my car could make the trip. It was
painfully slow going and it felt like we were stuck a couple of times
but we made it to the top where we found a couple of proud truck
owners that we had to take down a peg of two because if a lowly
two-wheel-drive car could make it then it was not too hard after all.
We got back in and rode down making it in one piece which was better
than the car. There was a few of the bits that were supposed stuck to
the bottom of the car were a lot less stuck there than they were when we
had left.
Plenty of Room in the Trunk
The Fairmont was a really big car for a two-door sport model and it
had a massive trunk. One night when we were going out we smashed 21
kids in the front and back and while it was not comfortable we did
not die. One afternoon my brother, some friends and I were going to
make a run to the local thrift store for some light low-fashion
shopping and we didn't have room for all 8 people who wanted to go
without going laps. For 15 and sixteen-year-old boys there was
nothing worse then having to go laps with some dude and risk being
labeled gay, so that option was right out. One of the boys offered to
ride in the truck if we would get him a pillow and a blanket to lay
on. We provided him his accoutrements and he loaded up and we closed
him in the trunk and hit the road. The Fairmont was close to twenty
years old at that point and its exhaust system had seen better days
wherein the gasses produced in the engine were gracefully whisked out
the butt end of the car with none going into the cabin or trunk at
all. Sadly, and almost tragically, those days had passed. When we
arrived at the store we opened up the truck to release the luggage
traveler to find him semi-conscious and complaining of numbness in
his hands and feet as well as blurred vision. I would bet you
anything it had to do with all of the exhaust gasses that had leaked
into the trunk while we were driving but with no test equipment there
with us there is no way to know for sure. We helped him walk over to
some shady grass where he said he needed to throw up but he didn't
throw up after about five minutes he said he was doing fine and we
went to find some ridiculous clothes to buy. Just to make sure we
didn't kill him we let out previously trunk only passenger join us
even if it meant going laps. Maybe we are insufficiently committed to
appearing heterosexual at all times but this was one time when we
thought it was better to be apparently gay then dead.
I Don't Fix Cars
 |
| No, no and hell no I will not fix you in a puddle of ice you spawn of car-Satan. |
That same winter, which was particularly wet and sloppy I had the car
break down on me. I pulled the car off the road as it was dying at
the time I was most interested in getting out of the flow of traffic
and I had not noticed that I had parked right in the middle of a ice
filled puddle. In these dark days before cell phone ubiquity I was
forced to walk along the side of the highway until I came upon house
with a telephone I could use. I called my mom who contacted my dad on
the radio and he called me back at the house. This is the kind of
ridiculous crap that had to go on before you could just pick up the
phone and call whom you wanted. He told me that the fuel pump was the
problem and that he had known about it and he had actually bought one
and it was on the porch. I called my mom back and had her bring me
the pump and some tools. She showed up in about an hour at the house
where I was holed up away from the weather. She drove me to the car
and I confidently jumped into fixing the car. I do not fix cars so I
don't know where my unreasonable confidence came from but I was
quickly in over my head, literally. I located the old pump but the
bolts and hoses were not coming loose and I was cold, wet and
honestly on the verge of tears when I dropped the finally free bolt
into the puddle I had parked in. I swore, shivered, built up my
courage and then plunged into the four inch deep slush puddle to find
the bolt. In the way that bolts are never in the place they fell it
was not was not in the place where it fell. I stood up with the bold
sodden and spirit broken and not in the mood to finish the job. I
thought about having to tell my dad it was too hard for me and that
steeled my nerves and I plunged into the job again and the hard part
had passed I guess because the other bolt was not so hard. The new
pump needed to be wiggled in a little but it was not that hard except
for my frozen stiff fingers that would not cooperate. Pump in and
hoses on I went and sat in my mom's car for a bit while I warmed up
enough to see if I had fixed it or if I would have to admit defeat. I
didn't think I could mentally handle failure at that point. Warmed a
little I went and pleaded a little that the car would start in the
way a shade tree, or in this case an ice puddle, mechanic will
sometimes do. The gas was a way back from the engine and so I put a
little starter in the carburetor to coax it to life and on the first
turn it fired up. Hooray! Just kidding it did fire up but it was just
burning the starting fluid. Dry again in sputtered and died. Damn. I
turned the engine over dry a few times and when it started to sound
like the battery would not give anymore I sprayed in a little more
fluid. This time it went longer and then died. I decided to push the
battery to start the car or at least a glorious death. It tried
valiantly and then whir-whir-whired to a halt. I was shivering, it
was dark and my car was dead now and my repair didn't work. I laid my
head on the steering wheel and cried. I sat there for a few minutes
wallowing in self pitty when my mom opened the door and caught me in
a vulnerable moment. I tried to compose myself and look like I had
not been cryign but I think she knew and told me we should head home
and call it a night. We drove home in silence. When my dad and I went
back the next day we hooked the car up to his truck for a jump and
when I turned it over it roared into action like nothing was wrong.
In the piercing sun of a winter morning I felt some degree of pride
but a firmer resolution to never, ever, fix a car again. For the most
part I have stayed on that particular wagon.
The Boys and The Hood
I had access to a couple of different vehicles once I was able to
drive. I had the sporty two door ford Fairmont, a beater work truck
with a ridiculous hand painted portrait of an elk on the door and a
nicer work truck. I usually drove the car but I would go with the
nicer work truck if it was available and the elk truck was the dregs
of my high-school rides. If it was a date night I would try and
spiff up whatever car or truck I was taking with a little low rent
detail work and maybe a spritz of my dad's old spice to make it
really fancy. One night a friend of mine and I were meeting a coupel
of girls for a movie in the next town over and I took the truck
because the weather was a lot nasty and I thought that was my best
chance to live through the night. We drove over in light snow and
watched some movie and I got to hold some hand which means basically
mission accomplished. The girls had to head strait home so we
couldn't pursue the game any further. We went out to the truck to
ride home loaded up, turned the key and not a thing happened. I
discovered that I had not turned off the lights after we parked and
the battery was flat dead. The street was pretty desolate as you
might expect in a blizzard late at night. It took me and my friend
twenty minutes to flag down a rescue truck for a jump and we were
off. The snow was made up of huge flakes that swirled and blew
reflecting the light back into the cab and making it difficult to see
the road and more importantly the side of the road.
 |
| Like this, but not so clear and it was pitch dark and plus I was terrified. |
We had driven
about two miles from the theater to the outside of town where the
street lights ended and I was creeping along trying to make it down
the road when a gust of wind blew the obviously poorly closed hood
and smashed it up against the wind shield. I am not sure if I
screamed, or peed my pants, or maybe both. I tried to stop but on the
snowy ice the truck started sliding sideways and I couldn't see a
thing. It was a helpless and terrifying feeling to be sliding
sideways in a white out waiting to see where we ended. We slid to a
stop on the side of the road and we got composed shut the hood and
tried to finish the drive home. We got about halfway home and I was
leaning far forward to try and see through the snow when another gust
slammed the hood back into the cab. That time I am certain I screamed
the F-word startled out of my snow trance. My friend
Dukes-of-Hazzarded out of window and jumped on the hood to close it
for good this time, we made it home with no more lid ejections. My
dad asked the next morning how it went and I told an abbreviated
version that left out the hood smashing. He said he was glad we made
it home okay. Sometime in the next days my dad noticed that the hood
of the truck was smashed up like someone had jumped on it and the
hood was creased like it had slammed into the cab. Curious, very
curious. The mystery was never solved, and I tacitly plead the fifth
while my dad raged about who could have done this to his truck.
Octa. . .Pussy
There was a time in the Bond franchise that the innuendo got a little
less subtle and they just started using the word 'pussy' in the
tittles and for women's names. This fact played into one of the best
unintentional comedy moments of my life. My friend Cole and I were
over in the next town over looking for a movie to rent and when we
found one we took it up to the checkout girl and she looked up my
account which had a late fine on it. Pretty routine for someone of my
impeccable self discipline and responsibility. She scrolled down the
list to tell me what movie the fine was for and then she started to read
the name of the Bond film confidently, “Your late fine is for Octa.
. .” and then she saw what the rest of the tittle was and got
really self conscious, broke eye contact, lowered her eyes, and whispered, “ . . .
pussy.”
 |
| Thank-you unsubtle tittle chooser guys you made my life a little better. |
It was one of the funniest things I had ever seen or heard so Cole
and I instantly broke down laughing. I asked what movie the fine was
for again and this time she whispered the whole tittle, with eyes averted and still with the
pause, 'Octa. . . pussy'. I can only imagine that she thought we had
somehow found, rented, and negligently over kept the only adult film
in the immaculately family friendly establishment. She was now worried
that the sort of person who would rent something like that was the
sort of person who was a pervert and not to be trusted. I asked a
third time just to see how long she would do it and she just turned
her monitor for me to read the name myself. I composed myself, payed the fine, rented the new movie and headed out laughing. The
whole ride home we recounted and repeated the story to ourselves and
were almost crying with laughter when we got back to Cole's house.
His mom asked why we were laughing, when we told her she said something to the effect
that we were idiots. We did not care, it was still hilarious.
The Bonds of Shrimp
besides the pure power and unbridled joy of driving being sixteen
opened other doors for me namely solo video rental. My own account
and my own choices meant that the fare could be a little less family
friendly, in theory. Practically with eight, then nine, then eight
people living in a mobile home together with one TV smack dab in the
middle of the living room meant that the fare was exactly presentable
at all times. The biggest use I made of the rental privilege was for
absolutely not gay Bond and Shrimp dates with my best friend where no
girls were allowed. I say not allowed but it was a little more like
they were uninterested and they would have been heartily welcomed if
they had shown the least degree of interest. I am not sure how it all
evolved but at some point we had a fairly regular gig where we would
find one of the James Bond movies that we had not seen yet in one of
the three video rental stores in our town and the next one over and
then go to the grocery store and buy a pound or two of shrimp. We
would head back to his house because he had only one non-mungy
brother who wouldn't even ask for some shrimp. They had a room for
the TV downstairs that was ideal for watching a movies without people
horsing around in front of you or worst of all having my dad come
home and making me work instead of entrophicate like I intended. We
would boil the shrimp, melt the butter and then fire up the mindless
action and misogyny which is the miracle of James Bond. We watched
all of the suave sixties bonds with Sean Connery, the goofy campy
Roger Moore stuff and the darker Timothy Dalton stuff. The best by
far though for absolute ridiculousness was the one off “In Her
Majesties Secret Service' with the awful George Lazenby. There is a
scene in the movie where George is wearing a kilt and he walks into a
room with a lady friend for a little mommy-daddy fun time and the
camera pans to his low ankles and in a cliché turned on its head the
man's skirt drops around his wool socks in what has got to be the
least sexy moment in film history.
 |
| Hard to argue with the fashion choices of a guy with twice as many women as I have. |
We laughed and laughed and
actually rewound it to enjoy again and again. In two years we watched all
17 of the Bond films that were on tape and even had a new one to go
see our junior year. Good times, good good times.
You're Our Only Hope
The thing that you must know about the CB is that the most important
thing when you are getting started is you must have a handle, a sweet
handle. A handle needs to evoke your very essence with a single word
or clever short phrase. When we were little and on the road on family
trips my sister went by Rose or Miss Piggy. She was not fat but she
really identified with Piggy's take no prisoners approach to being
and independent woman. I went by Cheetah because I thought I was
fast, I was not fast but a handle can also serve to evoke a desired
image as well as a literal one. There was a kid in our school a tall
gangly sort of cowboy that was named Jacoby. The spelling might be
off on that but it was pronounced JA-coh-bee with a long 'O' witch
made it a rather unique name. It sounded a little funny already but
at some point people stated calling him Obi Wan Jacoby because it
made it much funnier and it pissed him right off. When we got into
our CB abuse phase we one way or another determined that his self
chosen handle was Red 21. I don't know the significance to gods or
men of that name but it does have a certain panache that demands
respect witch was not funny. We would get on the CB and request to talk with Red 21 and when he would get on I would start in with the
greatest of all Obi Wan Jokes; “Help me Obi Wan Jacoby your my only
hope.” delivered in my best princess Leia voice. Oooo-boy did he
hate that. He would fluster and bluster and swear and threaten and
call me a faggot and a pussy and call me out to fight and we would
laugh and laugh. Then I would let it die down a little and in a couple of hours or days I
would change my voice to a nice deep twangy countrified trucker type voice and ask for
Red 21 and then ambush him again. I really think that if I could get
him on the CB today I would not be able to restrain the urge to give
it one more spin, for old times sake.
Dingdong Ditch
The same group of friends who got very involved in the citizens band
radio hooliganism were also up for a little Dingdong Ditching of an
evening. We did not at the time call it dingdong or even doorbell
ditching we had a much more ugly and racially charged name for it
which I will leave to the uninitiated's imaginations. For those who
may not be familiar with this practice it is just going by houses
late at night and ringing the doorbell and then running off. Not a
lot to do in a small town. One night a car and a van's worth of
ne'er-do-wells stayed late behind the pizza restaurant that my friend
worked as a delivery boy for until he got off and then headed off
looking for a little mischief. We decided to go by a couple houses of
people we knew on that side of town and dingdong ditch them. The
first house we went to was a girl who was not on the romance radar
and was a little annoying. Our older friend ran up and rang the door
bell about twenty times and then ran off to the van being chased by a
rather athletic and quickly responding dude in his early twenties. We
escaped just barely and mainly because we had the element of
surprise. We went to five or six other houses with nothing more
exciting then the porch light coming on. It was getting to be about 1
am and our lunatic friend decided he wanted another swing at the
chaser so we headed back for a rematch. We were poised with the van
door open when he approached the door and gave it a too long set of
rings and then took off with the psycho chaser responding in half the
time and had the van not been rolling and the door open my
friend would have been bagged for sure. We went to a half dozen more
houses and seeking the ultimate dingdong thrill my friend requested a
third go at the chaser. We pulled the van and car up a few hundred
feet down the road so as to not tip our hand and our friend went in
for the final insult. Even though it was now 2:30 in the ante
meridian he had scarcely depressed the bell switch the first time
when the door opened and out shot the dude hot in pursuit with
retribution on his mind. My startled friend scrambled and fell down
the stairs a little and had only made it to the end of the driveway
when he was captured. We didn't see what was happening because we
were on the wrong side of the driveway to see what was going on
behind the car. Our friend struggled a bit was arguing a little and
then came out to the van a few seconds later. He said that the guy
caught him and twisted his arm and told him that he was in the air
force and that if he rang the doorbell at night again he was going to
beat him. I figured that was the night for us and it was time to go
home but wounded pride demanded a final rematch because my friend is
crazy. We drove around the block and came right back my friend was a
little more ready for an ambush this time and the car and van were
both ready for action as he went to the side door this time rang a
good long ring and run jumped in the van and we were pulling off when
the harbinger of doorbell justice realized he had sprung out the
wrong door and was a step behind. We were a couple of blocks away and
not giving too much to our escape and focusing more on laughing when
we saw two sets of headlights pull out of the house we were just at
and start closing the gap on us really fast. The Van and car drivers
connected by the thread of radio took off towards our hometown six
miles away and to more familiar streets for evasion. The pursuers
stayed right with us and when we decided to split and head down
country roads one vehicle stayed on the van and one followed our car.
They followed us up and down streets and through windy roads for over
an hour until we shook them it was a little after four as we sat
parked backwards in some scrub oak on what was then known as the
bench watching the jeep that had been following us make a few furtive
passes up and down the side streets that we had abandoned. He finally
gave up and drove away. We gave it a few minutes to make sure we were
not driving into a trap and then made our way to the pizza delivery
friends house to spend what was left of the night and recount the
thrill of the escape.
5 Piece Chicken Dinner
The other thing that the CB could do with the proper equipment
installed was to act as a PA system. A PA system of mockery and
public ridicule. We could turn on a PA and drive past a girl and a
boy flirting in a parking lot and I would say, “Kiss her, I did.”.
We could drive by some cowboys and if we knew one of their names I
could make my voice sound like a sheep and say 'Kaaaaam is my
faaaather.' and then laugh while they got riled up by the implication
that they had participated in some barnyard buggery and sired a part
human part sheep monstrosity. We could flirt, mock, taunt and startle
all from the comfort of the cab with a mic in the hand and mischief
in the soul. We especially liked to break it out when visiting a
rival school for a sporting event and let loose a torrent of insults
and provocations on all of the parking lot and then wait for the
mayhem to develop. One of the funniest things for us to do in our own
estimation was to play the song, 'Five Piece Chicken Dinner” by the
Bestie Boys over and over driving around whooping and hollering while
the thirty second song repeated.
I don't know why that worked for us
but it certainly did. We never got beat up for our antics but one
time we did pick up some girls from another town whom we subsequently
dated. The moral of the story, if there is one, is that being a jerk
is rewarded with the affections of ladies but we already knew that,
didn't we?
What is Your Preference Ladies?
After our close run in with some angry truckers with butt whoopin' on
the brain you may have thought that would be a good time to knock off
the shenanigans, it would have been but we were dumb. For a while
there when ever it was just us boys we would get on the citizens band
and rile up the locals and the hundreds of truckers passing by on the
freeway every hour. There was a pretty major fuel stop in the next
town over from ours and at any given moment there was one local
prostitute or another slyly propositioning the passers-through with a
ridiculously simple code to break.
“Hey there big fella would you be interested in some 'Home
Cooking'? You would only need to bring me thirty 'Roses'.”
What could it mean? We needed no enigma machine to figure out what
those local ladies had on offer and we loved to antagonize them and
did whenever we could. We would often decode the message and tell the
truckers that she wanted to have sex with them for money. The ladies
would yell at us and tell us to get off the air and the truckers
would threaten to beat us up. Hilarious. Sometimes we would even pose
as truckers and make a deal and then lead them on until they figured
out it was joke and then they were really pissed. My friend started
asking all the truckers and ladies a single yelled question, “Thick
or long what is your preference?” and after a while just, “Thick
or long?”. Once it devolved to that the fun went out a little and
after about six weeks we just lost interest and left the roadside
hookers and their clients alone.
The Yellow Car
One of my friends that had been a neighbor we did battle with when we
lived in the mobile home park was in a lot of my math, physics, and
drafting classes so sometimes we ended up hanging out outside of
school just because. One of those days that we ended up hanging out
we were up in Salt Lake doing some errands that could only happen in
the big city and we had spent the day antagonizing truckers and
others on my friend's CB radio. We were making fun of their lack of
education, their funny accents, and most irritating - we were
implying that they may participate in homosexual activities while at
rest stops and in parking lots. We were having a great time with the
anonymity of the whole situation and making fun of adults felt
empowering. There were guys threatening our lives and promising to
teach us a lesson but we were feeling safe and free and easy because
they would never find us. Then the roof caved in. We were at a stop
light making our rude comments and innuendos when a trucker broke in
and said he saw the little fagots that were talking all the crap and
they were in a yellow car. As it happened we were in a yellow car. We
looked across the intersection and in a surreal moment of fear we saw
his mouth move a few seconds before the sound came over the radio. He
was telling the other truckers our location and out license plate
number. In that moment it seemed very probable that we may just be
taught a lesson in the form of a beating after all. We hauled off as
quickly as the law would permit and headed through a series of CB
hillbilly hell-raisers evasion maneuvers and then parked on a side
road out of the flow of traffic. We holed up and listened to the
trucker scuttlebutt for a bit tot see if they were still onto us.
They seemed to think they were on to us still but they were all in
the wrong part of town so we made our way to the freeway and sped
back home as fast as the little yellow car could go. We were not
beaten to death and we did not learn our lesson because when we were
back to safety we started right back in on the harassment.
Breaker One Nine
There was a time when the citizens band radio ruled the airwaves, and
that was significantly before my time. I was first introduced to the
magic of the CB by movies that glamorized the lives and exploits of
that great American king of the open road – the trucker. America
went through a phase there for a bit when all of the male sex symbols
were either driving truck in movies or helping truck drivers to
succeed with the help of that most magical of radios and its power of
two way communication. When I was ten or so my brother and I happened
upon a glossary of CB slang that had some hilarious terms that my
brother and I immediately incorporated the terminology into our
vocabulary. Here are some of the highlights:
Double Nickle: Fifty-Five Miles Per Hour
Bean Store: A Roadside Restaurant
Motion Potion: Gasoline
Hammer Down: Drive Fast
10-4: Yes
There were many more but I cannot remember them. We would string
together nonsense sentences of a gaggle of trucker slang like so,
“Hey now, hammer down a bean store double nickle 10-4 good buddy,
come back.” That kind of humor really worked for us and we would
say stuff like that every time we got on or a round a CB. This
prelude was to set the stage for the technological retro phase that
several of my friends got into in high school when we rediscovered
the magic of the citizens band and the mischief it could cause. And
it did.
The Damn Horn's Busted
My
friend Cole and I devised a hilarious practical joke that also helped
us speed through traffic. When we were driving I would intermittently
and annoyingly honk the horn which would make everyone on the freeway
get out of the way and put on their poopy faces. When we would pass
the other car my friend would hold a sign in the window that read
“SORRY, DAMN HORN'S BUSTED!”. When they saw the sign and the
resigned shrug my friend would give them they almost always smiled
and waved. We thought it was a pretty funny way to speed a commute
and one day we were driving up to Salt Lake for something and we were
running the Horn's Busted scam and we cam up behind a mini van in the
fast lane that was being particularly suborn about getting over so I
really laid on the sauce with a little extra honk music for our
reluctant victim. When they finally pulled to the middle lane and we
passed we were getting ready to shrug and show them the sign when we
realized it was none other then the drafting coach and his family
thirty miles from home and heading up to the big city as well. When
he saw it was us and read our sign he rolled his eyes and mouthed
something that looked something like “Pull Spit” or something
very close to that. We laughed for so long and so hard that we forgot
to keep running the prank. The following Monday when we got to school
and were in drafting class Coach walked up behind us and slapped me
in the back of the head and asked what a couple of reprobates were
doing up in Salt Lake pretending their horn was broken. We told him
about how funny the prank was and he had to admit that he was pretty
pissed that someone was riding so close behind and honking until he
read the sign which calmed him down until he saw who it was and then
he was pissed again. He was laughing when he retold the story to
everyone else though so I don't think he was that pissed.
Are You Guys Psychic Twins?
Most Saturdays during the fall and winter I was going to debate
tournaments. The coach would meet us early in the morning at the
school and then we would drive in a bus or Suburban to the school
where the meet was at and spend the whole day competing in events and
hanging around making jokes, flirting, and talking about the events
we competed in. It was all very soothing in a very nerdy way to be
with other people who knew what it meant to really tear into someone
during cross examination. You tell a regular person something about
how you absolutely destroyed this kids case and had him fumbling his
notes and not being able to find his place for the last speech and
they would not give a flying filibuster. Debate nerds wouldn't
exactly listen but sometimes they would wait quietly, feigning
interest, until you were done talking before they started telling you
how they did something like that too. My brother and I were both
pretty big jokers and in these, often long, down times we would laugh
and joke and make fun of people or play tricks on others. One trick
that we would do was a prank where we would pretend to be telepathic.
I would tell a someone, usually a cute girl someone that My brother
and I were twins and that we could read one another's minds. I would
tell my brother and the rube that I was thinking of a number and he
would bear down in obvious mental effort and then proclaim the number
and I would excitedly confirm any number he said as being the very
one I had thought of. About 90% of people would be amazed, not
guessing the trick and some would even get so excited that they would
want to see it again or run go grab some friends to see this
unfathomable trick. With those quicker on the uptake usually letting
the game play out the real fun came in seeing how long it would take
some people to suss out that we were just faking it. Sadly, there
were a few who never caught on and a couple who struggled with the
concept once it was explained to them step by step. At that point it
turns from comedy to tragedy and we lament the state of the American
educational system.
Rock Climbing Special Almost Kills the Crew
As part of my process of worming my way onto the closed circuit
announcements I offered to take the camera crew rock climbing and
rappelling to impress them. They took me up on the offer and we were
off and up the canyon with too many people and the school's official
video camera safely in the hands of the AV club. The general rule
with dangerous things is that people should know what they are doing
or be closely supervised but most of the crew had never done any
climbing or rappelling and the expertise was spread much too thin but
I was to excited about impressing the older kids and I didn't reign
in the mayhem and luckily no one died, not that we didn't try. We had
set up a rappel on a wall that afforded a couple of camera angles. It
was not a safe wall and there were lots of fairly good sized loose
rocks at the top that required a careful start to the rappel to make
sure that none were dislodged to fall on the rappeler and the
spectators. The first couple down paid careful attention to keep the
rocks from falling but then there was a kid, whose name I cannot
remember, decided to go commando – face down – and throw caution
to the wind to impress the crowd and camera. His rappel went okay
then he landed, stood up part way and a rock the size of the softball
that had jostled loose with his rappel came within inches of hitting
him in the head and instead hit him squarely in the back after
falling fifty feet. He dropped to his knees wheezing and struggling
for breath. Everyone ran over to see if he was going to die and he
rolled to his back writhing from the pain. He pulled up his shirt and
we saw a rather rough looking welt and red spot that was going to be
a bruise soon and for a while. I was really scared that he was going
to be badly hurt and I kept thinking about what would have happened
if it would have struck his head. I was sick with the idea of killing
someone and that shocked some sense into me so I climbed up and took
down the rope and told everyone we were going to have to call it a
day. It was not the last time someone would almost die climbing with
me and not even the last time someone would be badly hurt by a rock
that fell on them because they forgot to clear the rope before they
rappelled but live and don't learn that is what I say.
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